"Sun's Ian Murdock gave a presentation about OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live this past weekend. He hopes to expose open source enthusiasts to unique Sun technologies by creating a cohesive distribution that will provide a complete environment that is adequate for day-to-day use. This will involve bringing together the Solaris operating system and a diverse assortment of open source community projects and "adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together," Murdock stated. The final release will take place in May and the distribution will adhere to a six-month release cycle, just like Fedora and Ubuntu."

He pointed out that much of the success that Linux has enjoyed in the server room is a result of its increasing popularity on the desktop among system administrators and other IT specialists

So that's why Linux has stolen Sun's lunch, and that means all they have to do is get OpenSolaris on sysadmins' desktops and then Sun will be able to take over the server room again. Good luck with that. I think what we're looking at is the ripple effect of the Linux server adoption spreading to the desktop and back again. Sun didn't lose the server room because of Linux desktop usage.

"adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together"

A package management system to serve as a system integration tool. Go for it.

Special features of Sun's highly sophisticated ZFS filesystem, for instance, are used to implement rollback support for package management.

I guess when you have a nice new tool, it's the first thing you reach for. Sometimes you have to resist that and re-examine fundamentals.

I hope they are successful because competition is good for us all, but I am skeptical of the impact they will achieve.